Burnett's life was full of those reversals of fortune that mark her work. Following modest beginnings in mid-Victorian Manchester, she arrived in post-Civil War Tennessee at the age of fifteen with her widowed mother and two sisters. Burnett was the breadwinner of the family from the age of seventeen, eventually publishing a total of fifty-two books and writing and producing thirteen plays. She made and spent a fortune in her lifetime, was generous and profligate, yet anxious about money and obsessively hardworking.

Constantly restless and inventive, Burnett's personal life was as complex as her professional one. Her first marriage to a southern doctor disintegrated as a result of her notorious flirtations and a scandalous affair, and her subsequent marriage to an English doctor turned actor suffered a similar fate. She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but was herself a largely absent mother of two sons-overwhelmed by guilt when tragedy struck one of them; the other one never got over being the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy.

A woman of contrasts and paradoxes, this quintessentially British writer was equally at home in the United States, which honored her with a memorial in Central Park. Frances Hodgson Burnett reinvented for herself and for generations to come in both countries the magic and the mystery of the childhood she never had.

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the author of Carrington, a biography of Dora Carrington, and Black London: Life before Emancipation. She is a professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University, and an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter.

"A striking biography: moving, thorough and intelligent. A rare blend of scholarship and compelling narrative." -Toni Morrison

"As richly textured as a novel, and as full of idiosyncrasy, pleasure and pathos as real life. The author has done a wonderful job of conjuring, and Dora Carrington's story is vivid and moving." -Meg Wolitzer

"Gerzina's biography-the first to consider Carrington at length-is an engrossing and well-researched account of the British painter and her era." - Publishers Weekly

"Even those who vowed never to read another book on Bloomsbury will find themselves drawn in." -New York Times Book Review

"A heady story. . . . An essentially fascinating, psychologically sympathetic and well-researched book."-New Statesman